No, that's not the case. The same field that would play a league on the course will play worse as the tier ramps up. You know that's true where players choke up just a bit. They shake their head wondering why they couldn't throw down the 49 they shot in league last week when it got to the C-tier weekend. We have no examples out of 100 PDGA leagues so far where a league SSA came out higher than the SSA produced during an event on the same course. If it was different (and most were not) the league SSA was always 1-2 shots lower.

Honestly, I get what you are saying. I get the pressure aspect of it (but then in all that, I had the inverse effect in my pro career. I lit up courses in tournaments and couldn't hardly play them casually. Focus was always my thing and the more pressure, the more I focused, but anyway..).

But you can't honestly say that the fact the leagues have lower rated fields - by far - compared to normal PDGA events isn't a majority of this issue.

Repeat after me, "The average rating of the propagators makes no difference in the SSA produced. The average rating of the propagators makes no difference in the SSA produced." Yes, there are normal and larger statistical variances that disguise this principle in smaller fields. There are also differences when players are more familiar with the terrain being played, i.e. 950 rated plains players may have more trouble in the woods than those whose rating was produced on wooded courses. But when we have massive fields like Worlds, we can slice and dice the pools into groupings with different ratings ranges and they all produce the same SSA.

It wasn't precisely true at times in the past due to a shallow quadratic curve in the function. About six years ago we tweaked the formula to make the function work in a more linear fashion so player groupings at all rating levels would produce essentially equal SSA values.

It wasn't precisely true at times in the past due to a shallow quadratic curve in the function. About six years ago we tweaked the formula to make the function work in a more linear fashion so player groupings at all rating levels would produce essentially equal SSA values.

Says who? We have no alternate way to measure a course rating with any validity. And even if we had that, it wouldn't tell us how tough the conditions were that round accounting for weather, lighting and competition pressure. That's why the way we do ratings averages out to the closest measure of how well players played that round. Again, on average. In any statistical system a single data point is only pretty good, a bunch of them is much better.

In the old days, courses would have pages where you could see the SSA for any sanctioned round played on it.

My local course ranged from 46 - 51. I don't care what numbers you show or what curves you talk about, a course NEVER plays 5 strokes in difference without insanely crazy condition changes.

Does your home course have multiple pin positions? I've played courses that could play more than 5 strokes differently on pin positions alone (Tyler State Park comes to mind.) Never mind wind, heat/cold, rain or snow, seasonal variation in foliage, grass length, etc.